Kaelen sat rigid in the command chair. His breathing was steady, but his knuckles were white against the armrests. The Cortex burned faintly at his temples, a reminder that he had barely anchored them through the storm.
"Status," he said.
Seris's voice was low, taut with exhaustion. "Engines functional but unstable. Shield harmonics are degraded. Life support is steady."
"Alive, then."
"Barely," she murmured.
The silence stretched. Finally Kaelen straightened, forcing strength into his tone.
"Patch me through. Heliarch Council. Priority channel."
The comm field shimmered.
Twelve figures appeared, suspended in the grand chamber of the Council above Titan's shattered moon. Their faces were lit by the pale glow of Saturn's rings, every one of them etched with suspicion and fatigue.
Chancellor Meryn leaned forward, her voice clipped.
"Captain Verris. You sent an emergency relay. We expect answers."
Kaelen's eyes burned. "The Forge escalated. It's not just rewriting ships or systems. It tried to rewrite my crew. Their minds. Their loyalty. Their very sense of reality."
The chamber erupted. Murmurs, gasps, whispered arguments.
Councilor Jurn slammed a fist on his console. "I told you! It would come for us from within"
Another cut him off. "And yet Verris survives. He always survives. Perhaps he exaggerates its reach."
"Exaggerates?" Jurn roared. "Half our fleets would be dust without him!"
The Council devolved into clashing voices, the chamber ringing with accusation and defense.
Kaelen didn't join their squabbling. His gaze shifted past them, to the display of humanity's surviving worlds.
Earth floated like a scarred jewel, continents fractured into overlapping maps, rivers that flowed into deserts that never existed. Whole regions had been abandoned.
But it was the arcologies that held his attention.
The Aegis Lattice around Saturn and Jupiter glowed like a constellation made of towers and bridges. Cities suspended above storms, humming with probability shields, fragile yet defiant. Millions lived there, children in revision shelters, families rebuilding streets rewritten the night before, traders dealing in fragments of broken physics salvaged from Forge storms.
Every life was a flame waiting to be blown out. And every flame rested on the fragile balance he held.
Meryn's voice cut through the noise.
"Captain Verris," she said coldly, "some argue you are no longer humanity's shield, but its lure. The Forge adapts faster each time it meets you. Perhaps you are provoking it."
Kaelen's jaw tightened.
Lyra stepped into the frame, her voice sharp as a blade.
"She's right. The Forge isn't just fighting him anymore. It's fixated. Every move he makes, it answers harder. If it follows him back to Aegis, he won't just risk a crew, he'll risk all of us."
Her words struck like a blow. The chamber quieted.
Councilor Jurn growled, "Without him, we'd already be erased. He is the only reason we still have an Aegis."
The argument flared again, louder, harsher.
Kaelen finally rose from his chair, his voice cutting through the storm.
"Enough."
The Council froze.
"You can question me. You can doubt me. That's your right. But the Forge doesn't care about your debates. It doesn't negotiate. It doesn't stop. Every fleet, every station, every child in those arcologies, all of them are already drafts in its ledger. It's not if it comes for you. It's when."
He let the words hang.
"And right now, I'm the only one who understands how it thinks. The only one who can still hold the line."
The Council chamber fell into uneasy silence. Some glared. Some looked away. None gave him an answer.
The transmission cut.
Kaelen leaned back, staring at the void beyond the viewport. He didn't see Saturn or the stars. He saw the faces of civilians who had never known a stable world, who woke each morning uncertain if their homes would exist by nightfall.
The weight of billions pressed against him.
And in the back of his mind, the splinter's voice lingered like smoke.
You gave them hope. But you and I both know, hope won't be enough.
Kaelen's hand tightened on the armrest, knuckles pale. He said nothing.
The warning reached the Eidolon Spire before the shockwave.
"Transmission from Aegis-Station Neptune," Seris reported, eyes sharp despite her fatigue. "Encrypted, but priority tier."
"Open it," Kaelen ordered.
The holofield flickered to life. An officer appeared, drenched in sweat, uniform scorched, alarms flashing red in the background. Behind him, the walls bent unnaturally, curving in and out like liquid. A crewman staggered through the distortion and vanished mid-step.
"This is Commander Iven of Neptune Arcology. The Forge has breached our perimeter. It's rewriting the.e..e..." His voice broke into static. Then the feed snapped to black.
The silence on the bridge was heavier than any alarm.
Lyra swore under her breath. "It's accelerating. Last time, it took weeks to reach a new front. Now..., hours."
Kaelen's jaw clenched. "Plot course for Neptune. Maximum burn."
The Spire surged forward, tearing through the dark. On the external cams, the gas giant swelled in view, its storms flashing violet where probability burns licked the atmosphere.
And above those storms, humanity's defiance hung fragile: the Neptune Arcology.
Dozens of orbital rings glittered with light, connected by spires that reached like glass towers into vacuum. Residential blocks clung to the lattice, spinning for artificial gravity. Markets, schools, factories, a city alive, clinging to survival at the edge of everything.
But even as Kaelen's crew watched, part of the lattice collapsed into a warped spiral, like a necklace twisted until links snapped. Lights winked out across entire districts.
The Forge was already there.
Seris turned to Kaelen, voice low. "If Neptune falls, Aegis fractures. The Council won't admit it, but this arcology is the anchor for half our supply chains. Lose it, and Earth itself starves."
Kaelen didn't answer. He was already inside the Cortex, streams of probability weaving around him. He saw the collapse lines branching outward from Neptune like cracks in glass, lines that led, inevitably, toward Saturn and Earth.
"Seris," he said quietly, "ready boarding modules. We're not just fighting it from orbit. We're going in."
Lyra spun in her chair. "Into that?" She pointed at the feeds, at streets folding in on themselves, at civilians running only to reappear two steps behind. "You'll get trapped in the rewrites before you fire a shot."
"Maybe," Kaelen said. His voice was cold, steady. "But we can't hold a world from orbit. We hold it in the streets. We hold it in their homes."
The first impact hit.
A wave of distortion rippled across the outer ring. Entire districts blinked, gone one second, replaced with corridors that didn't exist the next. Screams bled through open comms.
On the bridge, Ryn slammed his fist against the console. "Captain, we can't stop this tide with a handful of weapons. We're throwing ourselves into a black hole."
Kaelen didn't flinch. He looked at each of them in turn, Seris, steady as steel; Ryn, afraid but unbroken; Lyra, torn between loyalty and doubt.
Then he said the only thing that mattered.
"If we don't go in, there will be nothing left to protect."
The Spire locked onto docking lanes. Alarms shrieked as the arcology's gates twisted between solid and fractured states, threatening to vanish before the ship could land.
Kaelen stood, his voice cutting through the chaos.
"Arm up. We're entering Neptune."
And for the first time since the fracture, his crew moved without hesitation.